Open world or sandbox are terms for video games in which players roam virtual worlds and approach objectives freely, as opposed to games with more linear gameplay.[1][2] While games have used open-world designs since the 1980s, the implementation in Grand Theft Auto III (2001) set a standard that has been used since.[3]

Video games with open or free-roaming worlds typically lack the invisible walls and loading screens common in linear level designs. Generally, open-world games still enforce many restrictions in the game environment, either because of absolute technical limitations or in-game limitations imposed by a game's linearity.[4] Examples of high level of autonomy in computer games can be found in massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPG) or in single-player games adhering to the open-world concept such as the Fallout series. The main appeal of open-world gameplay is that they provide a simulated reality and allow players to develop their character and its behavior in the direction of their choosing. In these cases, there is often no concrete goal or end to the game.

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An open world is a level or game designed as nonlinear, open areas with many ways to reach an objective.[5] Some games are designed with both traditional and open-world levels.[6] An open world facilitates greater exploration than a series of smaller levels,[4] or a level with more linear challenges.[7] Reviewers have judged the quality of an open world based on whether there are interesting ways for the player to interact with the broader level when they ignore their main objective.[7] Some games actually use real settings to model an open world, such as New York City.[8]

A major design challenge is to balance the freedom of an open world with the structure of a dramatic storyline.[9] Since players may perform actions that the game designer did not expect,[10] the game's writers must find creative ways to impose a storyline on the player without interfering with their freedom.[11] As such, games with open worlds will sometimes break the game's story into a series of missions, or have a much simpler storyline altogether.[12] Other games instead offer side-missions to the player that do not disrupt the main storyline. Most open-world games make the character a blank slate that players can project their own thoughts onto, although several games such as Landstalker: The Treasures of King Nole offer more character development and dialogue.[4] Writing in 2005, David Braben described the narrative structure of current videogames as "little different to the stories of those Harold Lloyd films of the 1920s", and considered genuinely open-ended stories to be the "Holy Grail we are looking for in fifth generation gaming".[13] Gameplay designer Manveer Heir, who worked on Mass Effect 3 and Mass Effect Andromeda for Electronic Arts, said that there are difficulties in the design of an open world game since it is difficult to predict how players will approach solving gameplay challenges offered by a design, in contrast to a linear progression, and needs to be a factor in the game's development from its onset. Heir opined that some of the critical failings of Andromeda were due to the open-world concept being added late in the game's development.[14]

Some open-world games, as to guide the player towards major story events, do not provide the world's entire map at the start of the game, but require the player to complete a task as obtain part of that map, often identifying missions and points of interest when they view the map. This has been derogatorily referred to as "Ubisoft towers", as this mechanic was promoted in Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed series (the player climbing a large tower as to observe the landscape around it and identify waypoints nearby) and reused in other Ubisoft games, including Far Cry, Might & Magic X: Legacy and Watch Dogs. Other games that use this approach include Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.[15][16][17]

Games with open worlds typically give players infinite lives or continues, although games like Blaster Master force the player to start from the beginning should they die too many times.[4] There is also a risk that players may get lost as they explore an open world; thus designers sometimes try to break the open world into manageable sections.[18]

Procedural generation refers to content generated algorithmically rather than manually, and is often used to generate game levels and other content. While procedural generation does not guarantee that a game or sequence of levels are nonlinear, it is an important factor in reducing game development time, and opens up avenues making it possible to generate larger and more or less unique seamless game worlds on the fly and using fewer resources. This kind of procedural generation is also called "worldbuilding", in which general rules are used to construct a believable world.

Most 4X and roguelike games make use of procedural generation to some extent to generate game levels. SpeedTree is an example of a developer-oriented tool used in the development of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion and aimed at speeding up the level design process. Procedural generation also made it possible for the developers of Elite, David Braben and Ian Bell, to fit the entire game—including thousands of planets, dozens of trade commodities, multiple ship types and a plausible economic system—into less than 22 kilobytes of memory.[19]

Emergence refers to complex situations in a video game that emerge (either expectedly or unexpectedly) from the interaction of relatively simple game mechanics.[20] According to Peter Molyneux, emergent gameplay appears wherever a game has a good simulation system that allows players to play in the world and have it respond realistically to their actions. It is what made SimCity and The Sims compelling to players. Similarly, being able to freely interact with the city's inhabitants in Grand Theft Auto added an extra dimension to the series.[21]

In recent years game designers have attempted to encourage emergent play by providing players with tools to expand games through their own actions. Examples include in-game web browsers in EVE Online and The Matrix Online; XML integration tools and programming languages in Second Life; shifting exchange rates in Entropia Universe; and the complex object-and-grammar system used to solve puzzles in Scribblenauts. Other examples of emergence include interactions between physics and artificial intelligence. One challenge that remains to be solved, however, is how to tell a compelling story using only emergent technology.[21]

In an op-ed piece for BBC News, David Braben, co-creator of Elite, called truly open-ended game design "The Holy Grail" of modern video gaming, citing games like Elite and the Grand Theft Auto series as early steps in that direction.[13]Peter Molyneux has also stated that he believes emergence (or emergent gameplay) is where video game development is headed in the future. He has attempted to implement open-world gameplay to a great extent in some of his games, particularly Black & White and Fable.[21]

According to Game Informer's Kyle Hilliard, Hydlide (1984) and The Legend of Zelda (1986) were among the first open-world games, along with Ultima.[43]IGN traces the roots of open-world game design to The Legend of Zelda, which it argues is "the first really good game based on exploration", while noting that it was anticipated by Hydlide, which it argues is "the first RPG that rewarded exploration".[44] According to GameSpot, never "had a game so open-ended, nonlinear, and liberating been released for the mainstream market" with The Legend of Zelda.[45] According to The Escapist, The Legend of Zelda was an early example of open-world, nonlinear gameplay, with an expansive and cohesive world, inspiring many games to adopt a similar open-world design.[46]

"I think [The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall is] one of those games that people can 'project' themselves on. It does so many things and allows [for] so many play styles that people can easily imagine what type of person they'd like to be in game."

1UP considers Sega's adventure Shenmue (1999) the originator of the "open city" subgenre,[62] touted as a "FREE" ("Full Reactive Eyes Entertainment") game giving players the freedom to explore an expansive sandbox city with its own day-night cycles, changing weather, and fully voiced non-player characters going about their daily routines. The game's large interactive environments, wealth of options, level of detail and the scope of its urban sandbox exploration has been compared to later sandbox games like Grand Theft Auto III and its sequels, Sega's own Yakuza series, Fallout 3, and Deadly Premonition.[63][64][65][66]

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl was developed by GSC Game World in 2007, followed by two other games, a prequel and a sequel. The free world style of the zone was divided into huge maps, like sectors, and the player can go from one sector to another, depending on required quests or just by choice.

In 2011, Dan Ryckert of Game Informer wrote that open-world crime games were "a major force" in the gaming industry for the preceding decade.[74]

Another well-known open-world game is Minecraft, which has sold over 122 million copies worldwide on multiple platforms by February 2017.[75]Minecraft's procedurally generated overworlds cover a virtual 100 billion square kilometers.[76]

The Outerra Engine is a world rendering engine in development since 2008 that is capable of seamlessly rendering whole planets from space down to ground level. Anteworld is a world-building game and free tech-demo of the Outerra Engine that builds up on real world data to render planet Earth realistically on a true-to-life scale.[77]

No Man's Sky, released in 2016, is a video game that features an open-world universe. According to the developers, through procedural generation the game would be able to produce more than 18 quintillion (18*10^15 or 18,000,000,000,000,000) planets to explore.[78] Several critics found that the nature of the game can become repetitive and monotonous, with the survival gameplay elements being lackluster and tedious. Jake Swearingen in New York said, "You can procedurally generate 18.6 quintillion unique planets, but you can’t procedurally generate 18.6 quintillion unique things to do."[79]

In 2017, the open-world design of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild has been described by critics as being revolutionary,[80][81][82] and by developers as a paradigm shift for open-world design.[83] In contrast to the more structured approach of most open-world games, Breath of the Wild features a large and fully interactive world that is generally unstructured and rewards the exploration and manipulation of its world.[84] Inspired by the original 1986 Legend of Zelda, the open world of Breath of the Wild integrates multiplicative gameplay, where "objects react to the player's actions and the objects themselves also influence each other."[85] Along with a physics engine, the game's open world also integrates a chemistry engine, "which governs the physical properties of certain objects and how they relate to each other," rewarding experimentation.[86]Nintendo has described the game's approach to open-world design as "open air".[87]

^Moss, Richard (March 25, 2017). "Roam free: A history of open-world gaming". Ars Technica. Retrieved October 6, 2017. Amazingly, open-world games can be traced back to the days of mainframes—namely, to the 1976 text-only game Colossal Cave Adventure for the PDP-10. Adventure at its core wasn't much different to the GTAs, Elites, and Minecrafts of today: you could explore, freely, in any direction, and your only goals were to find treasure (which is scattered throughout the cave) and to escape with your life.

^Moss, Richard (March 25, 2017). "Roam free: A history of open-world gaming". Ars Technica. Retrieved October 6, 2017. Colossal Cave Adventure was a direct inspiration on 1980 Atari 2600 game Adventure. Its open world may have been sparse and populated by little more than dragon-ducks and simple geometric shapes, but its relative vastness enabled players to imagine magnificent adventures of their own making.

^Mason, Graeme (April 9, 2017). "10 games that defined the ZX Spectrum". Eurogamer. Retrieved 2017-10-14. Lords Of Midnight's wonderful storyline (inspired, unsurprisingly, by The Lord Of The Rings), open-world gameplay and elegant graphics were one thing - its seemingly effortless welding of the traditional adventure game to these features set a new standard for software that remains an amazing feat over 30 years later.

^ abJankiewicz, Joshua (July 22, 2016). "Valhalla". Hardcore Gaming 101. Archived from the original on October 27, 2016. Retrieved 2017-10-14. Still, for a pre-King's Quest graphic adventure, Valhalla remains pretty unique with its open-world aspects. Being able to kill anyone and anything can be great fun, and seeing what weird things the NPCs will do on autopilot is strangely endearing.

^Koon, David (February 8, 2012). "Dani Bunten changed video games forever". Arkansas Times. Retrieved 2017-07-19. 'Seven Cities of Gold,' an Ozark Softscape title produced for EA in 1984 that eventually became the best-selling game of Bunten's career, was one of the first video games to take a stab at an 'open world' concept, allowing players to explore a virtual continent and set their own path rather than follow a regimented series of events..

^"The History Of: Iron Soldier". Retro Gamer (165). Future Publishing. March 2017. p. 79. Sean Patten was on board to produce and Atari was adamant that the game be open world. 'Those were the three pillars that formed Iron soldier,” explains Marc, “heavy property damage, a mech theme and a game that was open world and not on rails.'